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May 2005 - Posts

Not a Birds of a Feather, but something for TechEd 2005

Something special for IT Pros (and maybe for some developers!) I will be doing miniature versions of talks I have done before on keyboards -- how they work, how to develop them, how to deploy them. This will happen in Dr. International's clinic ( located Read More...
Posted Tuesday, May 31, 2005 6:23 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments
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When complex scripts are not too complex

Raymond Chen did a post yesterday entitled You can't simulate keyboard input with PostMessage . He did touch on the complicated language issues, saying: First of all, keyboard input is a more complicated matter than those who imprinted on the English Read More...
Posted Tuesday, May 31, 2005 12:46 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments

The GrokTalk meme spreads

Scott Hanselman posted about GrokTalk , and explained what it is all about: The deal is this: We've all sat through some pretty lousy technical sessions at conferences. For the most part, sessions at TechEd are filled with good information, but every Read More...
Posted Monday, May 30, 2005 5:38 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

Hats off to David Beaver

Or should I say, Háts off to David Beaver ? :-) Over on the Language Log , David noticed some interesting issues with Google search in his post entitled PASS THE HÁT . The basic issue comes up with Google's HYPHEN-MINUS operator. According to their documentation Read More...
Posted Monday, May 30, 2005 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

Doing something with TechEd slides

In years past, I had seen shows at the Front Row Theatre in Cleveland (it is no longer around, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is on the site where it used to be). I was struck at the time by the way that the performer would be facing different parts of Read More...
Posted Sunday, May 29, 2005 12:35 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 12 Comments
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Pass the string, please

A little over a month ago, I was talking about how SetLocaleInfo really stinks . Buried in my tirade was the germ of a question that people have asked in the past -- why is there no setting analogue to the LOCALE_RETURN_NUMBER flag used by functions like Read More...
Posted Sunday, May 29, 2005 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments

What was I saying?

What was I saying? I can't remember. Maybe I will look up on Adi Oltean's blog how much memory my version of Windows can have. Good thing I remembered where my RSS reader was! :-) Read More...
Posted Saturday, May 28, 2005 10:38 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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Second time's a charm!

(a tiny little bit if technical content in this post, but its in the second half and may not be worth the trouble sifting through this stream of consciousness blathering!) About a month ago in my post Getting Enough Exercise? I talked about my exciting Read More...
Posted Saturday, May 28, 2005 10:01 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments

Time zones and locations and keyboards, oh my!

Yesterday, Manip post a rant about the fact that the three settings in the title of my post today are not integrated well (in response to a post by Larry Osterman , who gets good comments even to his non-posts!). The rant: I'm using this misc story to Read More...
Posted Saturday, May 28, 2005 12:03 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 7 Comments

When do time zones and cultural settings get updated?

Yesterday, Jeff Parker post a comment to a non-post about time zones and backcompat from Larry Osterman ( Larrys blog is so cool that he has ideas pop up even when he only posts about the fact that he could do put up anything substantive since he was Read More...
Posted Saturday, May 28, 2005 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 12 Comments

Fixed my SQL Server CTP14 woes!

So I am setting up various Virtual PC images for SQL Server Shiloh and Yukon demos for my upcoming TechEd presentations. I was installing on different platforms, also -- because hard drive space is cheap and variety is the spice of life. :-) Suddenly Read More...
Posted Friday, May 27, 2005 12:53 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments

What isn't in the default install for NLS

Ram Mallika mentioned in the suggestion box: Can you please talk about the issues in a out-of-the-box support for complex scripts and languages, instead of making it as a supplemental language installation? Also, What can we expect on this issue on the Read More...
Posted Friday, May 27, 2005 2:07 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 8 Comments
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The last word on the FINAL SIGMA

Back in the beginning of April, I explained about the one scenario where casing does not need to roundtrip in .NET -- the Greek final sigma. Anyway, the day before yesterday I got an email from someone who had been reading my blog and was looking at all Read More...
Posted Thursday, May 26, 2005 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 15 Comments

You may want to rethink your choice of UTF, #3 (Platform?)

Ok, by now you know the drill -- I am comparing the various ways of expressing text in Unicode. In prior posts I have talked about the issues related to size and to speed . However, both of those posts were working in a theoretical vacuum that was independent Read More...
Posted Wednesday, May 25, 2005 3:20 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

Encoding scheme, encoding form, or other

No one ever accused the Universal Character Set of being simple. Just short of 100,000 characters, many different scripts and languages, all sorts of complex scripts. Unicode is downright hard, sometimes. If you asked me, that is the biggest reason for Read More...
Posted Tuesday, May 24, 2005 1:21 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

Did I mention that we're hiring?

Here it is -- I did mention that We're hiring . :-) That pointer is to a development postion. It turns out we also need a technical feature PM (program manager) too! The listing is right here , and it has a lot of good detail about the kind of person Read More...
Posted Monday, May 23, 2005 1:27 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

Revenge of something, that's for sure

" I have a sneaking suspicion that if there were a way to make movies without actors, George [Lucas] would do it. " -- Most often attributed Mark Hamill I saw Star Wars Episode III (Revenge of the Sith) on Saturday, and like just about everybody else Read More...
Posted Sunday, May 22, 2005 10:40 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 13 Comments
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When will this line end? And how?

I have talked about Chris Walker before. He is one of guys behind Notepad.exe for several versions, watching this uber-layer around a Win32 EDIT control be morphed into what some consider to be the most-used plain text editor on the planet. Often when Read More...
Posted Sunday, May 22, 2005 5:38 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 15 Comments
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For every expert...

How does the old saying go? For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert . Never did that anonymous quote seem more accurate to me than my first UTC (Unicode Technical Committee) meeting. Peter Vogel and I were having a conversation about it Read More...
Posted Sunday, May 22, 2005 4:09 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments

You may want to rethink your choice of UTF, #2 (Speed of operations)

In the first post in this series, I talked about size considerations , but even then I hinted that there is more to the decision than just size. I mean, I am not saying that size does not matter, but there are other facts that can matter more.... In this Read More...
Posted Sunday, May 22, 2005 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments

Recompiling with the new version

If you look at version 1.0 and 1.1 of the .NET Framework, they both have a Guid structure and a Guid.Equals() method which takes an object o and returns " true if o is a Guid that has the same value as this instance; otherwise, false ." Since every type Read More...
Posted Saturday, May 21, 2005 6:50 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

Not every function is documented

Ivan Leo posted the following note in the suggestion box: Why isn't RtlCreateUnicodeString() documented? I mean, it's a damn simple interface that has no reason to change, and is useful is one needs lots of UNICODE_STRINGs I cannot speak for the owners Read More...
Posted Saturday, May 21, 2005 3:15 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments
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Getting exactly ONE Unicode code point out of UTF-8

Now this is a question that I would make into an interview question, if only there were some way to do all the setup work in time. Unfortunately, unless the candidate is very knowledgable about internationalization on the way in, there is no way to get Read More...
Posted Saturday, May 21, 2005 3:45 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 12 Comments

Every character has a story #10: U+0478/U+0479 (CYRILLIC LETTER UK)

It all started so innocently, with John Jenkins of Apple asking a simple question on the Unicode List.... Is it kosher for U+0478 CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER UK (Ѹ) and U+0479 CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER UK (ѹ) to have basically the same shapes as U+0222 LATIN Read More...
Posted Saturday, May 21, 2005 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments

We're hiring!

The Globalization Services team inside of GIFT is expanding again, and we are looking for a Software Development Enginner (developer)! As a team, we are responsible for many of the underlying technologies and features that I have been blogging about every Read More...
Posted Friday, May 20, 2005 1:11 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments

You may want to rethink your choice of UTF, #1 (if the size matters)

The decision of which UTF (Unicode Transformation Format) to use might be driven by many different factors, so I will be doing a few different posts on this topic, looking at the factors individually. This first post will talk about the size considerations. Read More...
Posted Friday, May 20, 2005 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 8 Comments

What it means to be in the default MOBILE install

Almost a week ago, I talked about What it means to be in the default install . And about a week ago, Richie Rump talked about Windows Mobile 5.0 Unveiled . And then also a week ago, I got an email from a developer who asked the following. I’m figuring Read More...
Posted Thursday, May 19, 2005 1:07 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

The string is freaking empty!

Not too long ago, we picked up a new tester (new to the area, not to testing in general) to own collation for Windows and the .NET Framework. Now I will readily admit that is usually news that I take as well as getting a new hair stylist, which is to Read More...
Posted Thursday, May 19, 2005 6:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments

Typing in random Unicode code points

People ask all the time how they can type in random Unicode data. Some people point out the vast array of supported Keyboard Layouts on Windows . Others point out how you can create your own keyboards with MSKLC . Still others talk about fancy things Read More...
Posted Wednesday, May 18, 2005 8:00 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 20 Comments

No data loss (as long as it is Unicode data)

A few days ago, I made some SQL server developers nervous when I explained that Not all SQL Server collations are created equal . But there is one point I must emphasize here. There is no data loss in moving between collations, as long as you use Unicode Read More...
Posted Wednesday, May 18, 2005 7:30 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

More TechEd Europe 2005 info

You may have noticed the new graphic on the side there. As I mentioned previously , I will be in Amsterdam for TechEd Europe 2005 . The talks will be mostly the same as the ones in Orlando, but with two important differences -- (1) I will have all of Read More...
Posted Tuesday, May 17, 2005 7:44 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments
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JFo's keyboard post rocks, truly

Someone just pointed this one out to me today: Probably more than you want to know about keyboarding in Windows Forms…. It is one of many posts on jfo's coding , a blog that I will definitely be adding to my list. Sometimes the best way to get smarter Read More...
Posted Tuesday, May 17, 2005 7:25 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

Time/Date change for one of my TechEd 2005 talks

One small change: DAT290 Designing Multilingual Databases Using SQL Server 2005 Old time: Wednesday, June 8 10:15 AM - 11:30 AM New time: Monday, June 6 3:15 PM - 4:30 PM I have been assured that this is for very important reasons to do with interesting Read More...
Posted Tuesday, May 17, 2005 6:20 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments
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The weird, weird world of the SUBLANGID

I think I may have said in the past that the SUBLANGID is an odd beast. They are defined in the winnt.h header file in the SDK (and ntdef.h in the DDK). Here is an excerpt of the ones there (which mostly have the value of 1 or 2): #define SUBLANG_DEFAULT Read More...
Posted Tuesday, May 17, 2005 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments

Making noise....

"One of my early managers once shared with me the following piece of advice: if you don't get your hand slapped at least twice a year, you aren't pushing the boundaries hard enough." -- Sam Ruby , via Robert Scoble I'll have to keep this one in mind. Read More...
Posted Monday, May 16, 2005 7:13 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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Font substitution and linking #2

Back in the end of March, when I posted Font substitution and linking #1 , that ordinal at the end certainly implied that there were going to be a few more posts in a series. Sorry it took so long to get back to the topic, I have been busy. :-) Now I Read More...
Posted Monday, May 16, 2005 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 7 Comments

Dry the rain

(Nothing technical in this post, sorry!) It was really sunny yesterday. This works well since I have a convertible and got to run with the top down. I do need to point out that only an optimist could ever live in Seattle and own a convertible. It's not Read More...
Posted Sunday, May 15, 2005 8:01 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 12 Comments
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Not all SQL Server collations are created equal

Not all of the collations in SQL Server 2005 (a.k.a. Yukon) and earlier versions have coverage over the same full sets of Unicode code points. (By the way, this topic will be covered during my TechEd sessions, particularly DAT290: Databases for the World: Read More...
Posted Sunday, May 15, 2005 10:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

Encoding questions from the Suggestion Box

Uwe Keim asked (in the suggestion box ) several questions about encoding support and strings in the .NET Framework: Michael, I need your knowledge about how all this encoding stuff on strings work on .NET (I searched hours without finding usful things). Read More...
Posted Saturday, May 14, 2005 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 7 Comments

What it means to be in the default install

A few years ago, the Microsoft Office XP marketing team had a big advertising campaign that they hired Gilbert Gottfried for. The news coverage (in a rare burst of accuracy and journalistic integrity that I wish I had seen around here lately) summarized Read More...
Posted Friday, May 13, 2005 9:01 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments
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What code page does MSLU convert with?

The Microsoft Layer for Unicode is usually just a very simple wrapper over the non-Unicode APIs on Window 95, 98, and Me, that uses the default system code page to do the conversions. There are of course exceptions to this; there are times when Win9x Read More...
Posted Friday, May 13, 2005 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments
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Why doesn't GetDateFormat take a CALID?

Meikel Weber posted (in the suggestion box): Hi, Your article today reminds me of an old question. Why is there no "GetDateFormat" API that takes a CALID as parameter? Thank you for this really cool blog!!! Well, thanks for the kind words. :-) Some questions Read More...
Posted Thursday, May 12, 2005 1:21 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments
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Thinking beyond the BMP of Unicode

A few days ago, CornedBee left a comment to my post Raymond's Chinese dictionary : > by some reports over 60,000 of the over 70,000 ideographs in Unicode/GB18030 Suddenly the 65000 characters in a Windows WCHAR or a VC++ wchar_t seem so little ... Read More...
Posted Thursday, May 12, 2005 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments

Dealing with backcompat across many versions

Larry Osterman posted earlier today about Turning the blog around - End of Life issues and I thought about the issue. I think I have talked about the backcompat issues enough in the past that it is pretty clear where I stand on the issue of when we say Read More...
Posted Wednesday, May 11, 2005 10:40 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

Why UnicoWS.dll forwards to the OS on Unicode platforms

The original version of the Microsoft Layer for Unicode's DLL only ran on Win9x. Ever. Now it had the loader , mind you, which would properly call the operating system or MSLU depending on where you were running, but there was no code in place to handle Read More...
Posted Wednesday, May 11, 2005 5:01 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments
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UCS-2 vs. UTF-16 (not quite Kramer vs. Kramer)

Rasqual asked, in the suggestion box: Windows associates the idea of Unicode with 'Wide char', that is a 2-byte long character (currently). A comment on Raymond Chen's blog stated that Windows 2000 uses the UCS-2 representation of Unicode and Windows Read More...
Posted Wednesday, May 11, 2005 2:01 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments

Case/kana/accent/width sensitive SQL Server, for testing

A few minutes ago, I posted about Achieving case insensitivity , to deal with how best to make things case sensitive in an expression in SQL Server. Now looking beyond the issue with that one expression, and to the wider issue of collations and what to Read More...
Posted Wednesday, May 11, 2005 12:16 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 10 Comments

Achieving case insensitivity

Julia Lerman said just a few hours ago that she is a SQL Server luddite . I think that is not really true. I've read her blog, and I know people who have heard her speak in public. I plan to see her speak soon, in Orlando, because of that! But when I Read More...
Posted Wednesday, May 11, 2005 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 10 Comments

Dr. International is blogging!

That's right, the well known Dr. International now has a blog, subtitled Thoughts, tips, questions and suggestions – all things international . Definitely a good add to the list of blogs I read ! The Doctor starts of strong with a post entitled Hello Read More...
Posted Tuesday, May 10, 2005 8:16 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments

A better question -- what is the performance, Everett vs. Whidbey?

Rico Mariani decided to try a managed version of the dictionary I talked about earlier today. According to Rico, the question of the hour is: How does Raymond's program fare vs. the equivalent managed code below? But as far as I am concerned, the question Read More...
Posted Tuesday, May 10, 2005 6:41 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 11 Comments

Zipping up Unicode file names

Let's create the following filenames: αβγδεζηθ.txt АБВГДЕЖЗ.txt אבגדהוזח.txt กขฃคฅฆจ.txt (they can be empty or have data in them) And then try to zip them up with your favorite program (I'll use WinZip, you can use anything you like here). The zip will Read More...
Posted Tuesday, May 10, 2005 6:31 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 21 Comments

More on 'repetoire fences'

In my earlier post about Raymond's Chinese dictionary , I mentioned how in some cases code pages can be treated not so much an encoding technique as a 'repetoire fence'. The idea is not all that novel. In this age where most major software products are Read More...
Posted Tuesday, May 10, 2005 3:31 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments

You can't get there from here

For the 'I laugh so I will not cry' file: Over in The Language Log , Bill Poser reports in LOST IN TRANSLATION about an interesting step that the government of Gaeltacht in Ireland (a region where Irish is still common) has taken to help assure the continuing Read More...
Posted Tuesday, May 10, 2005 12:01 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments
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Raymond's Chinese dictionary

Raymond Chen is going to be developing a Chinese dictionary over the next while. This is a really cool project that I am definitely keeping an eye on, for a lot of reasons, one of which is related to my prior blather about how IMEs have it easy . Dictionaries Read More...
Posted Tuesday, May 10, 2005 10:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 10 Comments

Slate says 'Blame Canada' but that is not what worries me

In Slate , Sydney Spiesel reports in a piece entitled Blame Canada about the decision in Canada to ban Adderall XR, and what. Now I am not a huge fan of what many intelligent people consider the over-mediation and misdiagnosis of children with Attention Read More...
Posted Tuesday, May 10, 2005 10:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 8 Comments
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Why is multiple sclerosis research so hard?

(No technical content in this post) I was asked a question in email about why research on MS seemed to be so difficult to get done. It is an interesting question, so I thought I would post an excerpt from the FAQ entitled Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) Read More...
Posted Tuesday, May 10, 2005 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments
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Every character has a story #9: U+06a4 (ARABIC LETTER VEH)

Patrick Andries started the thread off back in July of 2002: 06A4 ARABIC LETTER VEH * Arabic for foreign words Is it true that this letter is sometimes used in Algeria to represent G (as in guide, gone) in Proper Nouns (of Berber origin). Source : Yannis